Seagate offering 5% refunds on storage products

A class-action lawsuit was started against storage maker Seagate back on March 22, 2005. The complaint was over false advertising by Seagate over the quoted size of storage included in its products. The complaint stems from how Seagate regards 1 KB equaling 1,000 bytes whereas in truth it actually accounts for 1,024 bytes.

Seagate has not admitted any fault on its part, but in a bid to settle the lawsuit, it has presented a new offer to the courts. The offer consists of allowing any customer who bought a Seagate drive between March 21, 2001 and September 25, 2007 a 5% refund on the price they paid. The court has yet to approve the offer.

If you are one of the lucky ones who can get some money back, then you need to go and fill out a form and include the serial number of the product you are claiming against. As an alternative, Seagate is also offering a suite of software applications, which can be claimed by filling out an alternative form.

Seagate is not the only company to be sued for misleading hard drive sizes; Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, SanDisk, and Kingston all still have ongoing lawsuits in progress. Western Digital settled a similar case in 2006 by offering free software plus paying legal fees of a half-million dollars (see our previous coverage).

It looks like Seagate is worried about the costs of an ongoing lawsuit and is trying to follow what Western Digital did in 2006. The reason big business prefers to offer these mail-in rebates is because it puts the focus on the customer to take the time to fill in the form and send it back; not everyone will do this and the company saves money.

I think everyone is used to the stated size of the hard drive not matching up to what you actually get, but why do it? It makes for a nice rounded number on the side of the box and does make the drive look bigger than it actually is, so it is good marketing. But surely the number of outstanding lawsuits should make the manufacturers think about making it clearer what the actual size is.